How Safe Are Our Troops?

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The shortage of armored humvees is a parable for the miscalculations that have plagued the U.S. enterprise in Iraq. Given that it was a war of choice for the U.S., the typical soldier's reasoning goes, the Pentagon had plenty of time and money to make sure the troops had everything they needed. But John Keane, the Army's No. 2 officer during the war, told TIME last week that "we did not anticipate fighting an insurgency in Iraq, and that's the truth of it." As the rebellion escalated in late summer 2003, the Army didn't have the armor it needed to protect U.S. soldiers during messy nation building. "In terms of the equipment strategy," says Keane, who retired in October 2003, "that changed everything."

The chaos of postwar Iraq forced U.S. troops to wage alleyway fights with insurgents while trying to rebuild a war-torn nation--neither of which can be accomplished in 70-ton M1 tanks. Instead, commanders turned to the successor to the jeep, the 20-year-old High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV), as the humvee is officially known. With canvas doors and a skimpy skin of sheet metal, most humvees are designed to move small numbers of troops quickly. After a 1993 mine blast killed four U.S. soldiers in Somalia in their thin-skinned humvee, the Army began buying armored versions for deployment to hot spots like the Balkans. But neither the U.S. Army nor the Bush Administration fully embraced the vehicle until the Iraqi insurgency exploded. The Army originally thought it needed 235 armored humvees to help bring peace to Iraq. But shortly after Bush declared major combat over in May 2003, the need for armored humvees took off like a rocket. Five months later, commanders in Iraq wanted 3,100. By early this year, the requirement was 4,000. Last month the total quietly doubled to 8,105. The Army, in other words, needs 35 times as many of these vital vehicles as its war plan predicted.

As the insurgency intensified, soldiers in Iraq began replacing the humvees' canvas doors with metal plates, draping Kevlar fabric over the seats and lining the floors with sandbags. Slowly but surely, the Pentagon began outfitting soft-skinned humvees with 1,000-lb. Armor Survivability Kits--which protect passengers from ground-level attacks but don't harden the humvee's floor, a major vulnerability when dealing with roadside bombs. The Pentagon has also scoured the globe for heavily armored humvees, sending to Iraq hundreds that had been based in the Balkans, Germany and South Korea. Even a few earmarked to protect the Pentagon have been sent "downrange," as soldiers say. At $180,000 each, they cost more than twice as much as standard humvees.